€5M Funding Backs Aardaia’s Bid to Turn a Forgotten Legume Into Europe’s Next Protein Crop

Returning investor FoodLabs , which led the company’s pre-seed round, as well joined. “We can now design crops on demand” Aardaia breeds new plantings from wild and forgotten plant species using genomic sequencing, phenotyping and AI-assisted prediction, without genetic modification or gene editing. Its flagship planting is the aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus), a protein-rich tuber that fixes its own nitrogen and requires no synthetic fertiliser. Going to the company, the planting could produce up to five times more protein per hectare than any harvest right now farmed, a target it is breeding toward rather than one already achieved at scale. Targeting Europe’s protein import gap The aardaker pairs the yield potential of a root planting with the nitrogen-fixing properties of a legume.

Aardaia positions it as a possible domestic alternative to imported protein plantings such as soy , much of which Europe right now sources from South America . Going to The firm, it is screening three-quarters of a million unique aardaker genotypes this year and aims to widen that to two million in 2027 with the new backing. © Aardaia “For most of history, inventing a new crop took millennia, so the world settled for improving the few it already had.

We can now design crops on buying interest, drawing on hundreds of millions of years of evolution to find plants that are already built to win. The aardaker is our first, and this round lets us put our foot on the accelerator,” stated Pádraic Flood, co-founder and CEO of Aardaia. Flood, who holds a PhD in plant photosynthesis genetics from Wageningen University. Previously worked at the Max Planck Institute and as Head of Genetics at Infarm, co-founded the business with Mike Henske, who has a background in agribusiness from Indigo and Solynta.

Going to Aardaia, its twelve-person team spans ten nationalities and includes six PhD holders across plant breeding, agronomy and computational biology. Backing from food-focused backers Point Nine, an early-stage venture firm typically known for software and AI investments , led the round. “At Point Nine we invest mainly in software and AI, so a plant-breeding company wasn’t an obvious fit. But after my first call with Pádraic and Mike I was hooked,” told reporters Christoph Janz, Partner at Point Nine.

Grey Silo Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Cereal Docks Group, framed its funding around supply chain diversification. “Their approach expands the range of harvests that underpin agriculture, starting with the domestication of nitrogen-fixing, long-forgotten harvest aardaker. If brought to scale, this bears clear implications for more resilient and diversified supply chains,” told reporters Matteo Leonardi, Investment Manager at Grey Silo Ventures.